Renesas to buy Altium; Nvidia to reportedly offer bespoke chips; Quilter’s AI-based PCB design tool; Cadence 2023 results

Let’s start with some comments, before getting to the news. Renesas’ acquisition of Altium will create a new, arguably unprecedented type of “bundle offer” targeted at system makers, by combining a portfolio of building blocks (chips) with a cloud-based software platform that is expected to reduce the system integration effort to put those blocks together. Will this help Renesas to sell more chips? Will this help Altium to sell more licenses? An obvious observation is that a system usually requires chips from a number of different vendors, so it’s not clear how a “privileged” relationship between a PCB design tool and just one specific chip vendor could benefit users. Unless the combined offering aims at making design system easier and more efficient for any choice of chips, including the ones that compete against Renesas products. But if this the case, it’s not clear how this could benefit Renesas. As for the impact of this acquisition on the EDA industry, it could be noted that Japan-headquartered Renesas is now directly competing against another Japanese company – Zuken – in the area of PCB design tools.

Another interesting news concerns Nvidia, reportedly building a new business unit to design bespoke chips for customers such as the hyperscalers. Waiting for more details, it can be observed that the hyperscalers internally developing their own AI chips seem to have made this decision also to gain independence from Nvidia, not just because they want tailor-made chips. In addition to that, one could ask if a new offering of bespoke GPUs could contribute to solving the GPU shortage – given the current global foundry capacity. OpenAI’s Sam Altman, who is on a mission to raise money to build new fabs, clearly thinks that the bottleneck is insufficient foundry capacity. And now, let’s move to the news.

Renesas to buy Altium

Japanese chipmaker Renesas has announced it will acquire US-headquartered PCB design software vendor Altium for $5.9 billion in cash. According to Renesas, the acquisition enables the two companies to “establish an integrated and open electronics system design and lifecycle management platform that allows for collaboration across component, subsystem, and system-level design,” by bringing together “Altium’s sophisticated cloud platform capabilities with Renesas’ strong portfolio of embedded solutions, combining high-performance processors, analog, power and connectivity.” This platform aims to cover the whole iterative process and all the design steps involved in the current electronics system design flow, “from component selection and evaluation to simulation and PCB physical design,” unifying them “at a system level”. As Renesas points out, “the combination will also enable integration with third-party vendors across the ecosystem to execute all electronic design steps seamlessly on the cloud.” The vision behind this move is “to make electronics design accessible to the broader market to allow more innovation through a cloud-based platform.” Increasing overall productivity, this platform “brings significantly faster innovation and lowers barriers to entry for system designers by reducing development resources and inefficiencies,” Renesas maintains. As recalled by the acquisition announcement, in June 2023 Renesas standardized development of all PCB design on the Altium 365 cloud-based platform and has been working with Altium to publish all its products’ ECAD libraries to the Altium Public Vault. Therefore, with features such as manufacturer part search on Altium365, customers can choose Renesas parts directly from the Altium library. Since Altium is listed on an Australian stock exchange, the acquisition will be executed by way of a Scheme of Arrangement (“SOA”) under the Australian Corporations Act.

According to a Reuters report, Renesas CEO Hidetoshi Shibata commented: “As long as we remain a traditional device manufacturer we will only be marginalized.” However, the initial reaction of the financial market after the acquisition announcement was reportedly negative for Renesas. Reuters also reports that Altium rejected a $3.9 billion takeover bid in 2021 from Autodesk as too low.

AI-based PCB EDA startup Quilter gets funding and makes its tool available in open beta

Quilter, an AI startup company building generative circuit board design software, has announced a $10 million Series A funding round led by venture capital firm Benchmark. The Quilter PCB design tool – described as “a compiler for circuit boards” – is now available to try for free in open beta. According to the company, unlike conventional products the Quilter tool completes the entire job and optimizes designs with physics. It also works with the user’s existing toolchain.

Cadence-Dassault tool integration for electromechanical design

Cadence and Dassault Systèmes have extended their ongoing partnership by integrating the AI-driven Cadence OrCAD X and Allegro X with Dassault’s extended 3DExperience Works Portfolio, for Solidworks existing and future customers. The cloud-enabled integration is expected to improve collaboration between electrical and mechanical engineers developing electromechanical systems.

Cadence’s 2023 results

According to Cadence president and CEO Anirudh Devgan, 2023 was a record year for the company, which achieved 15% revenue growth, 42% non-GAAP operating margin and over 20% non-GAAP EPS growth. More in details, revenue was $4.090 billion, compared to $3.562 billion in 2022. GAAP operating margin rose to 31%, compared to 30% in 2022. Non-GAAP operating margin was 42%, compared to 40% in the previous year. GAAP diluted net income per share reached $3.82, compared to $3.09 in 2022. Non-GAAP diluted net income per share rose to $5.15, compared to $4.27 in the previous year. The earnings call prepared remarks are available here.

Siemens improves EM-thermal simulation of axial flux motors

The latest updates to Siemens’ Simcenter software include the new Simcenter E-Machine Design solution, which combines electromagnetic and thermal simulation to address the challenges of designing compact axial flux motors for electric vehicles. Axial flux motors pose challenges in heat dissipation (due to their compact size and complexity) and in accommodating the required air gap between rotor and stator.

Nvidia to reportedly create a new unit for bespoke chips

According to a Reuters exclusive report, Nvidia is building a new business unit focused on designing bespoke chips for cloud computing firms and others, including advanced AI processors. With this move, the GPU giant would aim to capture a portion of the market for custom AI chips and shield itself from the growing number of companies pursuing alternatives to its products. The report mentions Broadcom and Marvell as two of the companies who so far have benefitted from the quest for alternatives to Nvidia chips. Nvidia officials have reportedly met with representatives from Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Google and OpenAI to discuss making custom chips for them. According to Reuters, the new custom unit is lead by Dina McKinney, a former AMD and Marvell executive.

Acquisitions

Monolithic Power Systems has acquired Axign, a Netherlands-based fabless semiconductor startup that specializes in programmable multicore DSPs for audio applications.

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